Daily driving

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🚧 This page is a work-in-progress. Some information contained within may be inaccurate or incomplete.
In particular: This page is not finished, daily-drivers please contribute
Icon WARNING: This page does not (and will not) contain full list of issues. Author want it to be a combination of unaddressed issues, milestones and design differences comparing to Android/iOS

I would like all daily-drivers to contribute to this page. Imagine you had such when you were curious if your scenario is covered. It would have saved time…

Use case

Being dissatisfied with bloated Android or conservative self-aware iPhone is not enough. You need to get through issues below to decide if it's a good idea.

Consider below scenarios:

  • NO: I'm social-media addicted person. Ad-based social-media are no-goal, support for those apps is constrained.
  • NO: I need 100% battle-tested alternative ecosystem. This software is not yet stable enough
  • NO: I communicate mostly through Microsoft Teams, LinkedIN, Skype. None of these apps are designed to work on a Linux smartphone.
  • NO: I use plenty of shiny apps: shop-discounts, mobile games. None of these apps are designed to work on Linux smartphone also non-goal.
  • NO: I rely on quick mobile payments. NFC payments are not supported natively, banking apps neither. (Unless you use Waydroid (Android in container)).
  • NO: I use my phone really intensively: Unless you have powerbank, I would not try it.
  • NO: I need my phone to have a high-quality camera.
  • YES: I use my phone for SMS, calls, web browser, Matrix/XMPP/IRC, news
  • YES: I use my phone for calls and SMS everything else I do via browser
  • YES: I am tired of non-removable ads and tracking I'm ready to sacrifice comfort for getting rid of it
  • YES: Although I use my phone for non-trivial tasks, I want to escape overwhelming notifications

Issues

Linux phones are suffering with multiple issues that could be categorized in following way:

Software

  • No mobile payments (no native banking apps, no gPay, no ApplePay stack ported — just carry a card)
  • No popular social-media apps, you could possibly use them via browser with limited functionality.
  • No (noisy) notifications from apps excluding SMS/Dialer, UnifiedPush not integrated
  • Default behavior — GUI app does not run in background. (On android when you launch an app and close it, mostly you could still receive notifications from it provided that it has permission)
  • Suspend behavior — freeze user space and running apps, wake on modem events
  • No dual-sim support
  • Issues with MMS and separated APNs (Upstream, ModemManager)
  • Wiki pages listing apps:

Hardware

  • no trust store, keys stored in secret-service unlocked (or not) on boot (exception: Librem 5 supports OpenPGP card)
  • (in most cases) no camera support
  • SoC suspend issues (most phones does not properly handle this)
  • Mainline issues, downstream kernels are dirty piece of code that could not be ported or upstreamed. pmOS is not designed to work with them.
  • Old slow SoCs, PinePhone developers and designers put huge amount of work to prove that it is possible to bring full hardware-software support. However, a device that launches a browser in > 6 sec. simply cannot compete with instant response that we know from Android.

Mixed

  • (Ultra) power saving mode is problematic due to SoCs, there is no software stack that could behave in similar way. Power saving known from Linux laptop is sometimes available.
  • Mostly no tri-state-key support from software
  • NFC rarely supported from hardware, no phone shell-integrated behavior for handling events.
  • With suspend disabled, battery life is awful
  • No eSIM support on non-Qualcomm devices - see eSIM Manager
  • No RCS
  • Mostly no USB OTG
  • Call with Bluetooth headset is missing

What should I expect?

Positive

  • 99,99% lack of ANY system or in-app advertising, micropayments and all this disturbing mobile-era crap. Imagine good old Nokia that evolved on university. Does what it is designed to do and nothing more. Browser without ad-blocker are exception.
  • No aggressive telemetry, no tracking-by-default, no TOS, no Privacy Policy, no data is captured.
  • You put a sim card into your device, you set your lock screen pin, you are good to go. No account is obligatory to use phone.
  • Easy automation using shell scripts, autostart
  • You could write an app in any programming language that Linux supports, without bindings.
  • Modern GNOME/Kirigami apps are working on both desktop and Linux mobile. They are handy and minimal.
  • Great PC ⇿ Linux Mobile integration with KDE Connect (easy sharing of: files, notification, clipboard)
  • You can encrypt your /root partition using standard LUKS and type pass on boot.

Negative

  • Battery drain
  • Mostly no camera
  • No notifications (excl. SMS and dialer)
  • Music may not stop when someone calls you. More than one audio stream could be played at once.

Phosh

  • No home screen, just list of apps instead
  • No widgets on home screen
  • before 0.40 no toggle switch for mobile data on/off

Plasma Mobile

  • no VPN toggle switch
  • Issues with copy-paste between GTK and Qt apps

SXMO/SWMO

Volunteer needed

Devices

SHIFT6mq

Volunteer needed

Oneplus 6

  • Device page: OnePlus_6_(oneplus-enchilada)
  • Probably the best availability, price to usability ratio
  • Fast enough to compete with mainstream phones
  • Huge drawback are unstable calls (randomly you don't hear caller) and no camera

BQ Aquaris X5

  • Device page: BQ_Aquaris_X5_(bq-paella)
  • Although everything excluding camera and suspend are supported, this device is notably slower comparing to op6
  • All audio routed through modem on this SoC

PinePhone

  • Device page: PINE64_PinePhone_(pine64-pinephone)
  • Working camera and great post-processing scripts in megapixels.
  • Alternative FOSS modem firmware.
  • Security, Privacy: Modem connected through USB bus.
  • Unfortunately extremely slow, even in optimized apps written in compiled languages in c/c++/rust.
  • It is overheating.
  • Battery drain is a total disaster.
  • Earpiece loudness is weak.
  • useful link:

Xiaomi Note 4

Volunteer needed

Librem 5

Volunteer needed

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